Thursday, January 29, 2009

New media into old

I just finished listening to episode 64 of CBC's Spark, and it began with a couple of really interesting interviews with people who are turning new media into old (ie. newspapers or magazines).

Ben Terret and his friend Russell collected their favourite blog posts from 2008 and arranged to have them printed on actual newsprint in a project called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008. But what struck me was his idea of how this could be personalized. Imagine tagging blog posts during the week or month and saving them to delicious. On Sunday morning, delivered to your house would be a newspaper containing the text of all those blog posts. I would pay good money for something like that! There are a bunch of bloggers who write lengthy posts that I don't give enough time to fully digest. The screen is bite-sized media - I always have to move on to something else. But if I had something printed, laid out by a graphic designer, I think I would spend a lot more time on these thoughtful posts. Actually, there must be some utility that will do something similar to this and allow me to print on my home printer - anyone? Oh wait, read on...

The second interview was with Dan Pacheco, who has a similar idea in a website / service called Printcasting. This time the print format is a newspaper, magazine or newsletter, but locally targeted. It will be supported by local advertising, and "they'll only pay for the ads that run in Printcasts that we know are delivered." Here's the full FAQ on the service, which is scheduled to launch in Bakersfield, CA in March. Looks like they'll take some time before it's available worldwide - guess they're really sticking with that local angle. Oooh, but at the very end of the FAQ they mention that "Printcasting will be developed as an open source product, meaning anyone will be able to download and use the software for free." Cool.